The present invention relates to searching in the World Wide Web (Web), and particularly to xe2x80x9cdata miningxe2x80x9d in the Web involving a method for identifying customers of business competitors through Web searches.
The past decade has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. The effect has, in turn, driven technologies which have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. A major one of these technologies is the Internet or Web. The convergence of the electronic entertainment and consumer industries with data processing exponentially accelerated the demand for wide ranging communication distribution channels, and the Web or Internet, which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility, reached xe2x80x9ccritical massxe2x80x9d and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With this expansion, businesses and consumers have direct access to all matter of databases providing documents, media and computer programs through related distribution of Web documents, e.g. Web pages or electronic mail. Because of the ease with which documents are distributable via the Web, it has become a major source of data. Virtually all databases of public information throughout the world are accessible and able to be searched via the Web.
The ease with which great volumes of data may be searched from a computer attached to the Internet and equipped with a Web browser has led to the development of a type of xe2x80x9cWeb data miningxe2x80x9d in which combinations of Web searches are used to relate fragments of data, which individually appear to be innocent and non-confidential, to those who made the data available, but when pieced together can be very valuable in what is revealed about the publishers of data or related others.
In a business environment, all companies and organizations are very concerned about prematurely releasing competitive information regarding their products, services, product plans; but, most of all, their customers or potential customers. Consequently, all papers, publications and other information released by businesses made available through the Web have usually been scrutinized by technical, business and legal functions to safeguard competitive information, especially customer data.
Conversely, in the competitive business environment, competitors in all businesses seek to get information about each other""s customers through all possible legitimate processes.
The present invention provides a method for identifying business competitors"" customers through Web searching which is legitimate, fair to competitors, and in no way intrudes on unpublished or confidential information of such competitors.
The invention provides a business method for identifying business competitors"" customers through Web searches of job listing databases or job boards and company Web sites where jobs are also often posted direct. Items such as competitors"" business names, product names, acronyms, etc., are used as keywords, and the search engine results provide an index of potential customers who are posting job listings for employees skilled in competitive products.
It has been surprisingly found that in their efforts to hire the best employees as early as possible in commercial development efforts, the businesses being targeted by the present invention will release a considerable amount of information about their product selections, skill needs and the quantity of such needs. There appear to be at least two major factors compelling such customers to disclose what would be regarded as confidential customer list information by a competitive product supplier. First, development cycles should ideally be very short from concept to completion. Thus, companies do not have time for long employee hiring cycles when they are staffing up for projects. Thus, they are driven to publish as much information as possible in their initial job listings in the hope of quickly reaching the right potential job applicants. Second, because of product or technology specialization, a great many companies"" staffing needs are difficult to fill because of high demand and limited supply, which creates a highly competitive job market for high technology skills.
Once the Web sites and/or Web pages posting job listings of these potential customers are located, additional information relative to doing business with said potential customers may be extracted from such pages and Web sites through xe2x80x9cspiderxe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9cWeb crawlerxe2x80x9d routines that delve farther into a site""s content. Such additional information may be: the potential customers"" addresses and locations that are posting said job listings to thereby identify customer locations using competitors"" products; the quantity of the jobs posted in said job listings to thereby quantify the potential customers"" product needs; or the names, email addresses or phone numbers of people within the potential customers"" company having job needs to thereby identify potential contacts within the organization.